The roar of indignant Republican outrage from the likes of Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Sen. John McCain of Arizona makes it sound as if the current flood of illegal immigration is all President Barack Obama's fault. The fact is, it's everyone's fault in both parties and in both houses of Congress.

Everyone wants results -- now. But, amazingly, you can't demand immediate results to fix a problem that both parties, especially the Republicans, have allowed to grow and fester for years without adequate attention. The fact is, President George W. Bush pressed hard for comprehensive immigration reform back in 2007, but his own party blocked his efforts. Obama has pressed again and again for reform, but the GOP blocked him. Heck, the House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, lost his seat in large part because he was mistakenly portrayed by the tea party as being "soft" on immigration.

So now Obama is coming to Dallas to discuss the immigration crisis. He will meet with Perry, who is demanding action. Cornyn is complaining that Obama wants nearly $4 billion to address the crisis -- what Cornyn calls a "blank check" -- and yet Cornyn says Obama isn't offering any reform.

"Apparently, the president has given up on any effort to effect the kind of reforms that he knows and his administration knows are necessary," Cornyn is quoted as saying in Wednesday's New York Times.

What? Is Cornyn serious? Has he somehow failed to notice where the roadblock is on immigration reform? It's not in the White House. The White House is gung ho on immigration reform, and has been since long before Obama became its occupant. The problem is with Congress. And the last time I checked, Cornyn was a leader of that Congress and has been overtly timid in promoting anything that smacks of immigration reform. He and the rest of his GOP ilk are terrified of immigration reform because they know they will suffer the same fate as Eric Cantor if they even talk about it publicly as a legislative goal worth pursuing. They are allowing the tea party's simplistic, non-solution opposition to win the day.

And McCain is complaining that U.S. law is too lenient because it guarantees that unaccompanied minors from Central America, who make up the vast majority of those now flooding across the border, receive a hearing in immigration court to ensure that their deportations are properly handled and that they do not fall into the hands of child sex traffickers. McCain wants a 2008 law that required these hearings to be repealed. But that law isn't Obama's fault. The 2008 measure was signed into law by Bush. Does Congress want Obama to enforce the law or not? How should it be reformed, exactly?

Perry wants tougher border enforcement. That would be wonderful, except for the fact that border enforcement isn't the problem here. The child migrants aren't evading capture. They are turning themselves in by the thousands to the first border enforcers they can find. You could add thousands more border patrol officers, but all you'll wind up doing is reducing the wait times for these child migrants to turn themselves in.

What does McCain want the president to do? Ignore the law? Shove these kids into the Rio Grande and tell them to swim back home to Honduras or El Salvador?

U.S. and international law does not permit the United States to enforce its own borders beyond its own borders. These migrants cannot be blocked from entering U.S. territory until they have entered U.S. territory. So, for all of McCain's and Perry's complaining, they and their GOP partners have yet to come up with any plan whatsoever that can stop an immigrant from coming across and turning himself in. It is entirely unfeasible to build a wall that covers the entire expanse of the border, especially when it involves a body of water like the Rio Grande. The only other option is to accept the migrants' surrender, detain them, process them, and begin the tedious process of deporting them.

The urgent and immediate problem is how to deal with the 52,000 youths who have crossed and been apprehended. They have to be housed and fed temporarily while their cases await the legally required hearing in immigration court. That takes money. Lots of it.

And their cases have to be heard in a timely fashion by the immigration courts. How in the world can that happen when the immigration courts already face a huge, unwieldy backlog? Most immigration court judges have to hear thousands of cases each year. Most of these cases are rushed though the courts in bulk, with the judge sitting in his courtroom and the adult defendants standing in a remote holding cell, miles away, and their testimony broadcast by video. This cannot happen with children. Each case has to be considered individually. Lawyers tend to be involved because of the sensitive nature of child deportation proceedings. Which means the process is more time-consuming, more painstaking. That takes money, lots of it.

We urgently need more immigration court judges. To hire them requires a massive expenditure. That's why Obama is asking for nearly $4 billion. And if a GOP president faced this crisis, he or she would be asking for the same amount.

It's not a blank check. It's not some kind of sympathetic, liberal plot to open the floodgates to illegal immigration. It's what the law requires. And no president, Republican or Democrat, can ignore that law. Congress has to do its job and pony up the money to deal with a crisis that it has worked overtime to create. And the GOP has got to muster the courage to stand up to the tea party and recognize that immigration reform demands action now.